1. Field of the Invention:
The present invention relates to an appliance for peeling fruit and vegetables, and particularly, but not exclusively, to a hand-held appliance for home use.
2. Description of the Related Art:
The peeling or paring of various foodstuffs such as fruit or vegetables consists in separating the skin which normally protects the fruit or vegetable from the body or pulp thereof. Traditionally, this operation is performed by means of an appropriately sharpened knife, with the edge of the blade applying high pressure to the boundary region between the pulp and the skin, thereby separating them.
For hand peeling, i.e. peeling with the fruit being held in the hand, a considerable progress for clumsy people was obtained when an improved form of knife appeared, sometimes called "an economizer", having a surface for bearing against the outside of the vegetable and separated by a given height from the blade per se. Thus each pass over the fruit removes only a given thickness of skin, but only over a limited width and only on application of a relatively large amount of force.
With particular reference to peeling fruit, proposals have already been made to mechanize this operation by applying successive fruit to a device operating on the principle of a lathe, with the fruit being mounted between spikes, and with one or more fixed or rotary tools being brought to the periphery of the fruit in order to imitate manual peeling, i.e. in order to detach a continuous piece of peel.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,113,603 describes a device having a rotary knife with a cylindrical cutting edge combined with a disk for supporting the cutting edge and provided with windows which are sharpened in the plane of the disk for cutting off peel.
However, such devices are not suitable for peeling vegetables, firstly because of the high rate of wear on the cutting edges, in particular when peeling products whose skins contain earth, e.g. potatoes, and secondly because of the irregular shapes and different degrees of hardness to be found in vegetables. That is why vegetables are peeled industrially by means of abrasive devices which process vegetables in bulk under a flow of water, but which are subject to very high losses of weight during peeling.
Swiss patent No. 506,982 describes a vegetable peeler comprising a handle containing an electric motor whose shaft drives a rough-surfaced cylinder which is partially surrounded by a protective envelope having water admission means. Operation is analogous to that of a grater and is poorly adapted to following the irregular outline of certain vegetables. In addition, in the absence of water feed, the tool clogs up quickly and becomes completely ineffective.
The object of the present invention is to mitigate these drawbacks and to provide a peeling appliance capable of being actuated by hand and suitable for peeling fruit or vegetables very quickly regardless of their consistency, without requiring cutting effort and with practically no pressure on the surface to be processed.